Anti-Freemason Exhibition
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Grand Anti-Masonic Exhibition (Serbian: Antimasonska izložba) was the name of an antisemitic exhibition that was opened in Belgrade on October 22, 1941. This exhibition was part of a propaganda campaign by Serbs loyal to the occupying Nazi forces to "unmask the Jewish freemason and communist conspiracy that is behind all the society's ills". The exhibition was financed by the city of Belgrade, and as part of the exhibiton a number of commemorative stamps were issued in 1942. The exhibition was said to have been visited by some 80,000 people.[1]
Nazi Germany occupied most of Yugoslavia by April 1941. After a Serbian uprising of July 1941, Gen. Hermann Bohme, was given emergency powers to govern the country. SS - Gruppenfuhrer Harold Turner and SS Untersturmfuhrer Fritz Stracke handled the administration of Serbia. Milan Nedic was the "nominal" local ruler, comparable to the collaborationist regime of Quisling in Norway.[citation needed]
While Nedic cooperated with the German plans for extermination of the Jews, Serbian partisan groups often tried to save Jews from victimization. The history of this period is complex, filled with mutual accusations regarding the role of perpetrators and rescuers. The central theme was an alleged Jewish-Communist-Masonic plot for world domination, similar to propaganda once put out by the Tsarist secret police before the Russian revolution in the well-known forgeries The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Besides the exhibits at the exhibition, an enormous amount of propaganda material was prepared: over 200 thousand various brochures, 60 thousand posters, 100 thousand flyers, 108 thousand of samples of 9 different types of envelopes, 176 propaganda movie clips, four different postage stamps etc. Organizers advertised that "This concept of exhibition will be unique not only in Serbia and the Balkans, not only in southeastern Europe and Europe, but in the world."[citation needed]
The images on the posters shown in the exhibition were not new, and had been seen before in Germany during "The Eternal Jew" exhibitions in Munich and Vienna during 1937-1939. Serbian newspapers such as Obnova (Renewal) and Naša Borba (Our Struggle) praised this exhibit, proclaiming that Jews were the ancient enemies of the Serbian people and that Serbs should not wait for the Germans to begin the extermination of the Jews. A few months later, Serbian authorities issued postage stamps commemorating the opening of this popular exhibit. These stamps, which juxtaposed Jewish and Serbian symbols (but did not contain Nazi symbols), portrayed Judaism as the source of world evil and advocated the humiliation and violent subjugation of Jews. Of special interest was the material showing alleged Jewish domination of the American Press and "Finance," particularly control of The New York Times.
[edit] External links
- Helsinki Human Rights Committee about antisemitism in Serbia
- Anti-Semitic stereotypes and propaganda in Serbia from 1941 to 1945, Milan Koljanin, Istorija 20. veka, 2003, Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 83-118; includes many references
- Auction of commemorative postage stamps from the Anti-freemason exhibition
- Visualizing Otherness II Article on the Anti-Freemason Exhibition 1941-1942 on the Centre for Holocaust and Genocide studies, with more posters
- Hate stamps Article on the hate stamps published in commemoration of the Anti-Freemason exhibition
